FRONTLINE: THE WARNING
21 October 2009 by Cullen Roche
9 Comments
It’s truly remarkable how correct Brooksley Born was and to this day she warns that nothing has changed and that we will continue to suffer through significant financial crises and disasters. Do we never learn? How can we tolerate the business as usual environment that has re-emerged after the financial crisis?
This is a must see:
Source: PBS
It’s simply amazing that Summer’s was so wrong for so long and did so much to contribute to the current mess and yet he is in a powerful position once again. Unbelievable!
It’s like a bad dream. Even after all that has been lost there has been almost no changes to the regulatory system and the structure of the banking system. The boom/bust economy lives on….
Change you can believe in!
What did you expect? As Rahm said, this is a great opportunity. The group running the country is not interested in making things better. If they were, there are numerous qualified people ( many of whom I have read on your blog and others) they could have enlisted to their team to improve our economic circumstances. So now we are going to have to wait until the masses become so fed up that they throw this group out, and put in a group that actually tries to help our country ( and not just the banksters).
That may be a long time in the making. Reflation will work for a while, and a rinse and repeat election will not help. Who will we elect to clean this up out of our current parties? Obama again? Sarah Palin? Hilary Clinton? Most of my family and friends are still very polarized along party lines, with the “democrats” polarized further (I never thought I would see my Dad and sister argue for the same thing, but the “enemy of my enemy” seems to work here…). I’m slowly coming to the opinion our two party system has failed entirely. For the ramifications to come into the public mind in a pervasive and painful enough way to galvanize enough people into meaningful action … I fear what events that will take.
I think these leaders know a lot less about the economy than they think. Greenspan essentially admitted that his whole theory was flawed. Well news flash – Ben and Co. are running the same flawed model. Geithner, Summers, Bernanke – all of these guys are implementing a model that doesn’t work yet they continue to be allowed to do it.
I don’t think they know any better. They all think they know what’s best for the economy, but they are just throwing shit at the wall hoping it sticks….
Obama’s economic knowledge is underwhelming to say the least….
Simply incredible. What can you say. It’s all going to blow up again – greed is our undoing and knowing all this they can’t figure a way out.
“Derivatives” are being painted with a pretty broad brush here. Derivatives didn’t cause LTCM’s collapse; leverage did. Well, leverage and more than a dash of over-confidence. AIG didn’t need to be rescued because they wrote evil CDSs but because they under-estimated the potential risks and the resulting losses were levered. And say what you will about the failures of markets to self-regulate, but it’s a damn sight better than politicians whose best policy intentions inevitably distort the market. That said, as long as the Fed training manual indicates 0% interest rates to cure recessions, we will have more boom-bust cycles as capital is again misallocated.
A very good Frontline piece, however, in the beginning they alluded to lack of penalties for fraud but never really followed up. Then they never touched on interest rates, the housing bubble, Fannie and Freddie, etc. I still believe in letting the markets work with very loose guidelines. But, I think there should serious, LONG, jail time for fraud. Including jail time for everyone up the chain of command. (San Quentin type of jail.) After all, theft is theft, be it at the point of a gun or the point of a pen.